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Idaho unions are 8th-weakest in US, says 24/7 Wall Street

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Dan Popkey

The online news outlet 24/7 Wall Street reports that just 4.8 percent of Idaho workers are unionized and membership fell 25 percent between 2002 and 2012.

The report, posted Friday, says union clout is lowest in North Carolina. Idaho joins Utah and Arizona as western states the a top 10 list of states with weak unions. The other seven in the top 10 are in the South.

 

About

Dan Popkey came to Idaho in 1984 to work as a police reporter. Since 1987, he has covered politics and has reported on 25 sessions of the Legislature. Dan has a bachelor's in political science from Santa Clara University and a master's in journalism from Columbia University. He was a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association and a Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan. A former page in the U.S. House of Representatives, he graduated Capitol Page High School in 1976. In 2007, he led the Statesman’s coverage of the Sen. Larry Craig sex scandal, which was one of three Pulitzer Prize finalists in breaking news. In 2003, he won the Ted M. Natt First Amendment award from the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association for coverage of University Place, the University of Idaho’s troubled real estate development in Boise. Dan helped start the community reading project "Big Read." He has two children in college and lives on the Boise Bench with an old gray cat.

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3 comments on “Idaho unions are 8th-weakest in US, says 24/7 Wall Street”
  1. ronk83704 says:
    February 25, 2013 at 12:00 pm

    All of the Idaho union declines happened in 1986 when Gary Glenn turned this State into a “Right To Starve State”. A few years later, he, like most of his kind, ran away and left Idaho workers in the lurch. Glenn, and people like him, have made making a living very hard for Idahoans. Please note that he was a staunch Republican.

  2. SunDevil1985 says:
    February 25, 2013 at 1:08 pm

    My Party’s efforts to defund, privatize everything Public; deregulate everything Business launched “The Great Recession”. As Mr. Greenspan famously stated “there was a glitch”.

    In retrospect, “right to work” damaged the middle class in Idaho so a few could make millions. I was for it, right to work, before I was against it.

    We are not alone. See the “good work” by my fellow Republicans in Utah and Arizona.

    Utah:
    http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/home3/55598812-200/johnson-swallow-rawle-attorney.html.csp

    http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/article-77-16068-dialing-for-dollars.html

    Arizona:
    http://www.azcentral.com/news/politics/tomhorne/index.html

    Jack Abramoff: “Fire up the jet baby, we’re going to El Paso!!” Mike Scanlon: “I want all their MONEY!!!” Email interchange between Jack Abramoff and Mike Scanlon, February 6, 2002

  3. Gary Glenn says:
    February 27, 2013 at 2:33 pm

    Appreciate the hat tip, ronk.

    Now that we’ve passed Right to Work where we live now, in Michigan, my Boise native wife and I look forward to returning to Idaho as soon as possible.

    Reality check:

    “Idaho has been tops among states in economic growth since 2003. It has ranked high nearly EVERY YEARS SINCE 1987, a run of good times unmatched by any other state. …Idaho’s growth is remarkable because it has no single cause. …Idaho’s economy has clicked in every sector: farming, technology, tourism, construction, service industries. Big business has thrived, and small entrepreneurs have, too. The state has a 2.4 percent jobless rate, the lowest in the nation, and has added jobs EVERY YEARS SINCE 1987.”

    USA TODAY, September 26, 2007

    http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-09-26-Idaho_N.htm

1 Pings/Trackbacks for "Idaho unions are 8th-weakest in US, says 24/7 Wall Street"
  1. Idaho's topping US in minimum-wage workers is GOP's fault, says new Demo chairman » Idaho Statesman Blogs says:
    February 28, 2013 at 9:25 am

    [...] Right to Work in the 1980s. Since then, union membership in Idaho has fallen sharply, now ranking seventh from the bottom nationally as a proportion of the workforce, at 7.8 [...]